Last week I gave a Zoom class for the Jackson Hole Writers. Eleven people signed up. I asked for a thousand-word writing sample from them, taken from a work-in-progress that contained problems they hadn’t yet solved. Given the nature of works-in-progress, it was a request they could easily fulfill, unless their problem was that they hadn’t written anything yet.

They had all written a bunch. I got eleven pieces of writing—good writing—and read them carefully, taking notes. Some people in the class were doing things with their words that I wished I could do. Everyone knew how to construct a scene and introduce a cast of characters. Everyone wanted to be a better writer, which made talking to them about craft a joy and a privilege.

I focused my class on the violence of everyday life, which almost never makes it into stories. Readers may not pick up a story for its violence, but they get bored when it’s missing. They stop thinking the characters are real, because they’re too nice to be real.

It’s a rare story that keeps a reader’s attention if it doesn’t contain a bad person doing awful things to a good person, and a good person getting even or dying in the attempt. But it’s painful to put those actions on the page. Often the violence is psychological, and it’s even more painful to write than the physical kind.

I read the class a passage from my why-to-write book, MFA in a Box, which began by complaining that “Nothing much happens in many of the stories that I read. If the conflict needs to be solved by violence, often enough the writer leaves the scene.”

I had prefaced the passage with an epigraph from the writer Philip K. Dick: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Later in the chapter, I had written, “The writer’s most important function is bearing witness to what is real—to what hasn’t gone away, even though you’ve stopped believing in it.” I emphasized that writers need to have faith that reality exists, even though humans aren’t very good about figuring out the difference between reality and wishful thinking.

Witnessing the truth takes care and hard work and never pretending that you know what’s going on when you don’t, never pretending that violence isn’t there when it is, and never, ever running away from reality because you don’t like it.

________

I write this as Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has ended with his acquittal. I am not surprised at this outcome, because Trump has long experience in getting other people to commit violence for him without getting his hands dirty. When the Capitol was breached and vandalized and the Vice President was threatened with hanging, Trump was safely back in the White House, watching it all on TV.

No one knows how close Mike Pence came to death, but he’s a cautious man—cautious enough to never spend time alone with a woman who isn’t his wife—and he must have felt like he was spending time alone with death in spite of a lifetime of trying to avoid it.

Acquitted or not, Donald Trump remains a violent man. That fact won’t go away, even though Republican senators wish it would. They also wish that Trump’s claim that the Democrats stole the election wasn’t a lie, and that the Democrats had really managed a level of organization, discipline, and unified intent that they haven’t been capable of for fifty years.

What isn’t a lie—what won’t go away just because you stop believing in it—is that all humans are deeply violent beings. Violence is just under the surface for most of us, and all we need for it to come out is someone who will tell us it’s justified. Often enough, that justification is that someone has cheated us or stolen from us or is going to take our place.

Convince us of any of those, and most of us are capable of murder. Get any of us in a mob, and the idea that Mike Pence might have ended his life suspended from a gallows on the Capitol steps doesn’t seem farfetched at all.

________

If you don’t believe me, search your heart for murderous impulses. Imagine having a button that, if pushed, would make someone disappear forever. If you can’t come up with the name of a person you’d make disappear, you’re a better human being than I am.

Or not. Maybe you would disappear whole political parties, occupations, economic classes, tribes, skin colors, and nations.

Watching the Capitol riot, I found myself wondering what would have happened if God had performed a miracle and placed the Chicago police force, as they were in 1968, in the halls of the Capitol, waiting for the mob to break in. Those were the police who forever darkened the 1968 Democratic convention by leaving hundreds of antiwar demonstrators brain-damaged, crippled, and broken.

The Chicago police may have destroyed the future of this country in their desire to punish people they saw as hippies and anarchists. They certainly destroyed one future of this country, the one that had President Hubert Humphrey and single-payer health care and lacked Richard Nixon, Watergate, and Henry Kissinger messing with China and Chile and Iran.

Brought to January 6, 2021 by divine Uber, those same Chicago police would have held the Capitol steps against the rioters and killed a bunch of them. I’m ashamed to admit I would have cheered them on. Lots of people would have been injured and killed, but I would have thought it served them right for going up against a police force determined to make people behave in a civilized manner.

Had I really wanted to witness the families missing parents or children, the grief attending to wrecked lives, the blood oozing from ears, the broken bones? Not really. But somewhere below my neocortex, my reptile brain, a structure that hasn’t had a software update in a million years, would have been happy if it all had happened that way.

If I could get rid of the thinking, observing, logical, kind, and human part of myself, the rest of me would be free to cheer on murder.

________

I’m afraid of the Democrats’ muscle-memory coming into play.

If this country gets contemporary equivalents of Chicago Mayor Richard Daly, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara—to say nothing of Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, Democrats all—we’ll see what competent authoritarians look like, especially now that the Republicans have removed the constraints of compassion and decency.

If Republicans keep abusing Democrats with voter-suppression laws, lies about stolen elections, gerrymandering, scapegoating, and accusations of cannibalism and pedophilia, they’ll awaken a sleeping giant.

For the moment, Democrats can pretend they don’t have a dark side. Take away the obvious propaganda and QAnon conspiracy theories, and Democratic villainy takes the form of that too-nice-to-be-real Obama couple, Hunter Biden in rehab, OSHA regulations, the Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts, a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, and the Postal Service.

But turn the Democrats into resentment-fanning populists, equip them with graphs showing the last two decades’ worth of wealth transfer between classes in this country, wait for the inevitable foreclosures and bankruptcies and evictions as a debt-fueled economy reaches its brutal repayment stage, and you’ll see what a mob of angry true believers, properly coached, can do to the people they’re told to blame. A lot of people will have dibs on those weaselly little guys, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio.

There’s a good story in there somewhere, but it’s going to require a better author than someone who leaves the scene when the furniture starts getting tossed around.

________

I’ve told a couple of generations of writing students that they can send their characters into dangers that they would stay away from, have their characters say things they wouldn’t say themselves, and act on impulses they’re too timid or too smart to act on.

One of my collections of short stories, Sudden Death Over Time, consists of first-person dramatic monologues. Every character I invented to tell those stories, except for the last, is a psychopath. I didn’t have any trouble imagining them, which makes me a little worried about where they came from. 

People do mistake those bad, twisted, dysfunctional characters for the author. That’s why I ended the book with a peaceful and maybe dull story told by a person deeply in love with his wife, who spends his days building fence because a good fence, with all its hard work and slow progress, grounds him in a good and honest and human-scale existence. His story manages to free him from his substantial anger at the evil he sees in other human beings. Most readers are relieved, by that time in the book, that the author finally has shown them somebody who knows the difference between right and wrong, love and hate, cruelty and kindness, violence and peace.

The readers have already seen what happens to people who don’t discern those differences. A lifetime of amoral self-interest ends up as self-destruction, mainly because humans are mortal. Amoral self-interest looks pretty stupid from a deathbed.

At some point you have to start loving your fellow humans and doing what you can to help them, or your life doesn’t mean shit.

All of the psychopaths in my stories end badly. They die alone, staring into nothing, irrelevant when they aren’t scorned, fools who thought they were wise.

I learned not to be a psychopath not just by seeing my characters’ ends. Their whole lives are ugly, even in their moments of triumph. They are people who let their reptile brains construct their existences from the raw materials of laziness and stupidity and selfishness. The finished product is indistinguishable from pure evil.

________

I learn more from writing a book than I learned in school. Here’s a tip: if you can’t learn from real people, you should write books and learn from your characters.

In the end, writing is a program of self-improvement. Because it requires so much time and effort, writing glorifies the God of Hard Work, who is into self-improvement big-time.

There are worse gods. The God of Hard Work always sticks with you and mostly keeps you out of trouble. If Christ had worshiped the God of Hard Work, he would have stayed a carpenter, and there wouldn’t have been centuries of philosophers whining about that episode of parental abandonment in Gethsemane.

I didn’t tell my Zoom class, which contained a devout Christian or two, that last part. But they were all good writers, who had learned that hard work is a solid, honorable way of life, if not a deity.

________

I did tell the class that everything they would ever write would be an artifact, and necessarily imperfect. If they were writing a memoir, they wouldn’t be able to tell their own story just because they put an I on the page. Even when they tried to make those I-persons smarter, happier, more virtuous, and better looking than their authors, evil would creep into the mix. Readers would end up seeing things in authors that the authors themselves couldn’t face.

That’s okay. Readers appreciate characters with faults, and even authors with faults. But they care about characters more than they care about authors. Readers know when you invest your life in your characters. They know when you care for them, empathize with them, and give them the dignity you wish you had yourself. Take care of your characters, and your readers will believe in them, even when they don’t believe in you. In that case you may disappear, but your characters will remain.

________

We have had, for the last four years, a crappy author writing our national narrative. Even his latest impeachment ended with a whimper rather than a bang. When conflict between good and evil threatened, he said there were nice people on both sides, which is no way to tell a story. He treated his characters with contempt, and nobody, least of all himself, believed in them.

We’ve had to bring in a new writer. He’s got a new blank document on his computer screen. We hope he’ll be better with the language, among other things.

We know he’ll work harder than the last guy. We know he’ll be more interesting than the last guy.

We think he has a sense of his own mortality and what a life lived in service to other people looks like.

We hope he’ll be into self-improvement. We hope he’ll respect and learn from his characters.

We hope he has a sense that whatever he does, it won’t be perfect, but that won’t stop him from trying to make it so.

We hope he writes a self-help book. We hope he writes a story with a moral. We hope, when he confronts the inevitable violence beneath the surface of every story, the good guys win, and that they don’t take winning as permission to stop being good. We hope he’s taken a writing class.

We look forward to reading the initial draft.